In a switching network, all receiving channels (or ports) route data to a switching fabric, which then switches the data, which is normally in the form of data packets of uniform or variable length, to a specific destination transmit channel (or port). Because fiber optic technology can support data rates much higher than traditional electrical standards, fiber optic channels have become the high-speed channel standard. Because the data rate of a single channel of a switching network is now likely to be higher than the data rate of a single fabric connection, multiple fabric connections must be used to support the data rate of the single channel.
Thus the prior art implemented multiple connections in parallel to increase the effective bandwidth of a single fabric connection. FIG. 1 illustrates this concept which is known as packet striping (or bit splicing) where the input channel or sender node is divided into several lower speed channels and then resequenced again at the receiver node. Thus a typical data packet is divided into parts or stripes with each part being sent on a separate fabric connection. With the four connections, the effective bandwidth of the overall fabric connection is increased by a factor of four even though the actual bandwidth of each connection is one-fourth of that.
In packet striping, as implemented in a typical switching fabric, the packet is divided into equal chunks (a chunk being a portion of a packet) and each chunk is sent to a separate switching plane of the switching fabric.
In a practical example, a data packet which is 40 bytes in length sent over a fabric consisting of four parallel paths must be divided into four 10-byte chunks. Since each chunk or packet portion requires its own so-called header for identifying that chunk and its origin and destination, and this typically might require 2 bytes of information, this means that each transmitted data chunk has an overhead which is a substantial portion of the total data chunk. This effectively reduces the bandwidth by this amount (or, in other words, the effective data rate).